You may ask yourself...

"Why do you seek the chicken? What experience do you have with chickens? Do you desire Amelia only because she's a famous chicken? Do you understand the nature of the chicken commitment?"

Is it so wrong...

I can't explain my fascination, except to say that I find myself thinking that most situations would be better with the backing sounds of the Ukes of Hazzard.

Tomorrow, tomorrow

For the next few days I'll be replacing the commute to PARC with a short BART ride to the new Moscone Center West for Apple's world wide developers conference. I went last year and discovered that it's a funny little niche world of faded-black-shirt-mit-dandruff hackers and the occasional kraftwerk-and-khaki designer. The production values of the slideware are high (thanks to Tim's late night Photoshop and Keynote hacking) but beware of the cool-aid.

Take a trip...to the moon!

I won't say that you should go to the Moon casino and resort, but I do suggest that you crack open a cold one and take in the crazy ass moon tour video. Live the 70s, today!

Blogstreet

Blogstreet is making me very happy with their rss generator, as several of my favorite blogs don't provide feeds so I don't read them as often as I would like. I wonder if blogstreet is going to publish the algorithm that they use to take the HTML and render the RSS.

Grief

When I met Clyde the dog six years ago, I had no idea that she was the perfect person. Sure, she stunned me with her killer brown eyes and her willingness to be petted beyond all reasonable length of time, but I really didn't know how much a part of my life she would become when I married Shelley.

When we lived next to golden gate park, we ran a webcam pointed at Clyde's spot in the window and made a web site, ThatDoggieInTheWindow.com, on which people would watch Clyde as she looked over the neighborhood. While we were walking her people would stop us and ask if that was the dog in the window, and sometimes we would come home and find people talking up to Clyde from the street. Unless you were wearing a large hat (which would scare her), Clyde was always willing to let you tell her she was beautiful and pet her belly.

Three months ago, when we took her in because she was acting a little tired and we found out that she had hemangiosarcoma, I thought that we would lose her that day. Having read about the sudden death of George, by Philip Greenspun, I knew just how quickly the disease could kill.

Well, after a surgery and a few rounds of chemotherapy, Clyde spent three months acting like she didn't have a care in the world. She hunted gophers, ran all over Bernal Hill, and still demanded a lot of loving attention. Shelley's bike team rode the Cinderella Century with pictures of Clyde and the text "We Ride For Clyde" on their jerseys. Her veterinarians were amazed with how well she was doing, and they said that she might live another year.

And then, last week, Clyde started slowing down. Last Tuesday, at the vet appointment that was to be her last round of chemotherapy, the ultrasound showed that the cancer was once again on the move and the vet said that Clyde would probably start bleeding internally within the next few days. So, we canceled the chemo, took her home, and let her have the run of the place, eating directly out of the popcorn bowl and snoozing on the couch whenever she wanted. I'm sure she wondered why we kept crying, as we fed her fried eggs and petted her constantly.

On Friday's walk Clyde gave us a look and laid down, and we knew that it was time. Dogs (and people) get scared when they're unable to get up or when their bodies don't act as they should, and we didn't want her last days to be scary. So yesterday Shelley and I held Clyde while our vet gave her an overdose of anesthetic and she died quietly, taking part of us with her.

Rest in peace, Clyde.

Again, again, again

I should mention that all bloggers should make icons for themselves. In addition to adding that extra spice to a black and white blog, it's a form of self analysis, what with fitting all of you in a 32x32 block of pixels instead of hundreds of thousands of words. It's also the height of digital self fashioning.

For example, I asked my friend Tim if I could take his icon and futz with it a bit to make it look like me. So (working backwards from the icon to the persona) that would make me a derivative futzer and an unoriginal amalgam of my friends' work.

It's so unbelievably true! Icons don't lie!

No thanks to music thugs.

So, this is the last straw. I've decided to stop buying RIAA controlled music. I'm a well to do music lover, but it's just too much.

Thank goodness for the RIAA Radar. Now I know who's signed on with the thugs and who hasn't.

And thank goodness that Apple's going to sell indie music soon.

George and Abe

They still crack me up.

The Fedora

I'm pleased to find that the fedora project has released a digital repository system aimed at large collections of digital documents. Their target audience consists of institutions like libraries, but many of the technologies that they're creating could be repurposed for individuals or families who want to keep a digital repository. Thank goodness that they're opening their code and using standards where appropriate.

Do you think that large scale repositories are overkill for individual use? I just wrote a little file counter that tells me that I have 158,987 files under my home directory. I recently spent a fair amount of time getting rid of duplicates and consolidating archives into one heirarchy, so I'm pretty sure that almost all of those files are unique and related to my various projects (though not all created by me, of course). I've been slowly accumulating digital documents since 1992, but the great majority of my files are less than four years old. Multiply 150k files by the number of people in your family and then consider the number of years that they'll be accumulating digital documents.

Georgia Tech's Aware Home folks have an interesting paper "Preserving the Past, Enjoying the Present and Facing the Future: Interaction Design and Family Archives" [pdf] which details (among other things) a "Living Memory Box" which is a piece of furniture for generating family histories through capturing images of artifacts and generating narratives about them. Unlike most office document management systems, the Living Memory Box communicates the aesthetic of personal history and familial communication and the paper considers the emotional context of generating, viewing, and sharing family histories.

I do wish that I could like to a full text of the article in the February 2001 Dwell, "The Sensitive House", as it relates to our failing to support digital histories through architecture...

Dorkbot!

Last night I went to another excellent dorkbot, where Tim Thomson showed us 8 years worth of programmatic fun in his toolkit for interactive and algorithmic music generation. The making things folks showed us their robotic hand. And then Dr. Friendly showed us a terribly long video of his dynamic video editing performance piece, in the middle of which I was stuck by the urge to go home, which I did immediately as one shouldn't see too much of small asian men wrapped in plastic with video of atomic explosions projected onto them.

Die, BeOS, Die.

The, BeOS, The.

For some reason I was looking at YellowTab's screen shots of their new release of BeOS, and I noticed that they're using the sweet progress bar enabled icons that Tim Martin (now at Apple) invented. In my brief time at Be, Inc., I implemented just such a progress bar icon for files being downloaded by NetPositive, allowing people to see on the file icon how the download was progressing.

There is a lot to be said for a UI that implements ubiquitous multithreading until the last moment of rendering. Despite the sad fact that almost no programmers are capable of writing threadsafe code, there is a positive effect when several items update simultaneously that is different to our visual systems than the quickly interleaved lockstep of a UI that shoves everything through a single pipeline early in rendering.

That said, I believe that OS X and Win2k are each better than BeOS ever was in terms of breadth of libraries and maturity of design. Though I think the world of the code and the people who wrote it, I'm sad to see that there are people still working on BeOS as anything except a hobby.

A Chekhov Fivznit

Here are the shizzolated Chekhov 5:

1. How will history remember yo' ass?
2. What is yo' contribution?
3. Are izzall circumstances da same?
4. Can we ever really know another?
5. What does that shiznit matter, anyway?